As a full-featured, free alternative to Adobe Photoshop, GIMP is one of the world's most popular open source projects. The latest version of GIMP (2.8) brings long-awaited improvements and powerful new tools to make graphic design and photo manipulation even easier—but it's still a notoriously challenging program to use.

The Artist's Guide to GIMP teaches you how to use GIMP without a tedious list of menu paths and options. Instead, as you follow along with Michael J. Hammel's step-by-step instructions, you'll learn to produce professional-looking advertisements, apply impressive photographic effects, and design cool logos and text effects. These extensively illustrated tutorials are perfect for hands-on learning or as templates for your own artistic experiments.

Michael J. Hammel

Michael J. Hammel has been a contributor to GIMP since 1996 (version 0.59). A former contributor to Linux Format magazine, Hammel is the author of three books on the GIMP: The Artist's Guide to the GIMP (SSC, 1998), Essential GIMP for Web Professionals (Prentice Hall, 2001), and The Artist's Guide to GIMP Effects (No Starch Press, 2007). Hammel currently works as an embedded software engineer in Colorado Springs.

For many people in the digital age, the need to edit photos is a necessary job. The first thing to do is deciding what photo editing application to choose, for many this is The Gimp. If someone is choosing to or needing to learn and master The Gimp, this book is the best book I have seen in a while to help accomplish this task. Not only does the book cover everything from cropping family photos, to web design, but the book does so in such a good way. I find that it met me at my perfect level as someone who has used The Gimp, yet wanted to go farther then is possible without getting outside help. Thinks to this book I am now able to save time and be more productive while editing photos. This fact alone is worth the book. Trust me, you will enjoy this book a lot! If you are at all unsure about getting this book, don't be. This book will make you save time, have more fun and be more confident in making The Gimp work for you.

"The Artist's Guide to GIMP, 2nd Edition" is most definitely not your standard "How-To" book. It is more; much more. It inspires.

The first chapter lays the foundation with clear and concise instruction of the tools and skills needed to proceed further. It is a great tutorial for the beginner and a good review for the more experienced GIMP user.

And then this book actually gets exciting. Building on the tools established in the first chapter, the author leads the user into a realm of possibility and enjoyment. Covering the most needed topics of the graphic artist, this book truly inspires the imagination. Who says serious software can't be fun.